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I think Alito is pretty obviously right to make comparisons to print media, though even with that, there's still plenty of tricky. In fact, I think that we really shouldn't even speak the words "social media" or "internet" in this discussion. Instead, from a historical perspective, this really seems like a core freedom of the press issue. That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.
As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party like, just leave
Britneypress operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press. It's not an institutional press, like NYT/CBS/whatever. It's literally anybody who waltzes down to their press company and wants to use the press. And I think the underlying motivation, while not putting in words that it's effectively a non-discrimination law, was understood to have a non-discrimination effect. Whether or not there could be enough history here to make a legal determination given our current laws, just from a 'theory of good institutions in the vein of Why Nations Fail', it would be a pretty rough outcome for countries that went down the "freedom of the press" route rather than the non-discrimination route to discover that natural monopolies might arise to make this whole branch of the endeavor ultimately fruitless, if governments could just discreetly threaten the natural monopolists. I just hope we don't have to see a nation or three literally fail from going down this route before we either rekindle the non-discrimination-type theoretical roots of the freedom of the press or we explicitly adopt something that is a standalone non-discrimination provision.
Some additional nice things that this view captures: The third-party business is important and captured here. Old school printing presses were also third parties. It doesn't matter whether the guy who is asking the printer to print the thing is the NYT or Joe from across the street; if the government doesn't have a reason that is compelling enough to overcome 1A speech scrutiny, so that they can go directly to NYT/Joe and directly tell him that he can't say that, then they should be prohibited by 1A press scrutiny from going down the street to the local print shop or the commercial entity that actually does the physical printing for NYT and telling them that they shouldn't print it.
I think this distinction also captures some of the "government need" doctrine, as well. I accept that there are some genuine government needs that can overcome 1A speech scrutiny. For example, they can legitimately tell folks who have security clearances that they're not allowed to just write a book blowing a bunch of classified information. Of course, how is this balanced with things like the Pentagon Papers precedent? Well, in my view, the Pentagon Papers precedent is quite strong - if someone who didn't agree to keep classified information secret gets that classified information, for the most part, the government can't prohibit them from publishing it. There is some obvious danger here, but it's actually not all that far off from the tradeoffs we make in cybersecurity all over the place. If Party A discovers a flaw in Party B's software, even if Party B is a sensitive government function, the sort of accepted solution is that they tell Party B that they'll only have X days to implement a fix, to do what they can to protect some equities, and then they're going public. Yet, at the same time, some flaws are viewed as soooooo potentially damaging, that even Google's vulnerability team has failed to follow through on the threat to go public when the company with the flaw didn't bother repairing it. We basically let that decision be up to the Googles/Party A's.
Similarly, when the Intercept/Guardian got the Snowden files, they met with the NSA. The NSA did try to express the government's perspective on the matter. They asked the journalists to withhold some things from publication, arguing that some of the items were completely noncontroversial, directly within the government's known mission, were of extremely little "news value", and would cause significant damage to national security and/or sources/methods. I'm mostly fine with this, even though there is a lot of conversation here about government discussions being inherently coercive. It is genuinely difficult to draw lines here, and it's hard to come up with a good limit that prevents the Intercept/Guardian from getting the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment.
That said, I think it is infinitely preferable to the option of going to third parties. The Intercept/Guardian definitely have to weigh a lot of things, including the possibility of the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment, but at least they're the ones with skin in the game and the ability to actually weigh them. Whoever it is that prints their physical copies or hosts their website may have some skin in the game, just because it is possible for people to flee to other printers/hosters out of fear of being censored, themselves, but that skin is wayyyyyyy thinner than the actual party who wants to publish the information/opinion that they have.
Of course, this would make it much harder for the government to do what they want to do. There are lots of bozos on twitter spouting bullshit that the government would like to get rid of. If they actually had to go through the bozos rather than twitter, there would be substantial refocusing of efforts towards things that actually matter for national security, not bozos spouting off about their personal beliefs on COVID or whatever.
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